35 years ago, the first ransomware was distributed. It wasn’t via methods we think of today, but via a 5 1/4″ floppy disk, sent out by PC Business World magazine to their subscribers. Developed by a doctor, a biologist, these were also sent out to other locations, to the tune of about 20k disks. It purported to contain information about AIDS, but instead infected computers all over. It was somewhere in the first 1000 malware packages, and ranked as a Trojan, so was not self-propogating, which limited it’s overall impact. There were a few other oddities along the way, but that doctor, well, he was the most odd, in that he was later determined to be mentally unfit to stand trial, with many wild courtroom antics. Today, we fight a scourge of many 1000s of new malware packages each day.
The first-ever example of ransomware dropped 35 years ago, in December 1989.
Found at www.tomshardware.com
